Re: [topicmaps-comment] TMs & XTM [Was: skills to create topic maps]

[Tony.Coates@reuters.com]

On 31/12/2001 11:57:27 Lars Marius Garshol wrote:

>| [...] XTM is not the easiest thing to use XSL-T on (or at least, I
>| haven't developed sufficiently good techniques yet).
>
>It isn't. It's possible to do XTM work with XSLT, but my XSLT skills
>are not good enough to do merging correctly and still keep the XSLT at
>a manageable level of complexity.

Oh, let me be clear, the one thing I am not planning to try and do is merging in XSL-T.
It may not be impossible, but life is too short ...  However, I do want to be able to take
an exported topic map in XTM (which I will then assume is already fully merged) and
process that XTM using XSL-T.  You would think this should be reasonably easy, but
I find that different tools have amazingly different ways of encoding the same topic map
using XTM.  It's not that any of these ways is wrong, but it does make it hard to use
standard XML tools.

Actually, I was talking with Sam Hunting at XML 2001 about the role on "nsgmls" in the
history of SGML, and how one of its most useful functions was that it could normalise
your input SGML into something that could then be processed by a less sophisticated
application.  A similar tool for XTM, one that produced a particular normalised style of
XTM that could then be processed using XSL-T, would be a very good thing indeed.

     Cheers,
          Tony.
========
Anthony B. Coates
(1) Information Architect
(2) Leader of XML Architecture & Design
Chief Technology Office
Reuters Plc, London.
Tony.Coates@reuters.com
========



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